Don Marti

Fri 09 Aug 2013 06:26:15 AM PDT

More on Persona

The big Mozilla Persona News is that Persona now has a gateway for Gmail users. If you have GMail and use Persona to sign in to a site, then Google can see that you're using the gateway, but not which site you're connecting to.

Privacy win. With BrowserID, by design, your identity providers are not involved in the login transaction. This means they need not be aware of your entire Web activity, a significant privacy advantage. With OpenID, your identity provider is, unfortunately, a necessary participant in the login flow.

If your email address is on a domain that doesn't have a gateway or full Persona support, you can still use Persona, just with an extra step of filling out a form and getting an email confirmation. Try it.

Now for the fun part. If you're interested in adding first-class Persona Identity Provider support to your own site, so that people who have an email adddres on your domain can use it to log in at other places, read one webmaster's experience. After a few days of hacking, "rfk.id.au" now acts as an Identity Provider for the BrowserID protocol, a.k.a Mozilla Persona. This means I can now log in as ryan@rfk.id.au on any persona-enabled website while retaining complete control over my identity. I do not have to delegate my details or my credentials to a third party, even one that I would trust as much as Mozilla.

Bonus links follow.

How BrowserID works

Persona is a complete implementation of a new, distributed login system from Mozilla. BrowserID is the open protocol that governs how Persona works.

Persona is distributed. Today.

Persona on Firefox OS phones

Adding Persona authentication to richard

New Persona Beta: Millions of Users Ready to Log In using Any Browser

Persona and Surveillance

Fixing Sign-in

Mozilla Continues to Build the Web as a Platform for Security

Users don't like social login.

getting web sites to adopt a new identity system